Mechanical hard drives still rely on heads that float over the platter. These days they're built to operate an order of magnitude closer to the platter than 10-20 years ago - around 10 nanometers. The platters now spinning so fast that the head is also able to self regulate its height based solely on airflow dynamics and downforce. Small bumps and drops are not sufficient to break through the cushion of air created by the head moving over the platter at 80+ miles per our. Interestingly the force also works in the other direction, preventing the head from rising to high. You can picture it working like a magnet fixed in place over a superconductor, only this is obviously using a different force to accomplish the feat. For extreme bumps and drops, hard drives (particularly laptop hard drives) have accelerometers that can detect a drop or bump and call the head back to its resting place before it has a chance to smash into the platter.

No, I think the entire program should be scrapped both because of the health hazards, and because it's a gross invasion of privacy. If they're hell bent on keeping it around though, the least they could do is make it work properly. I'd rather be exposed to a double dose of radiation if it actually made me safer, as opposed to the status quo which is one shot for theater's sake.

Aside from just scrapping them entirely, wouldn't this be a non-issue if they just had the traveler rotate 90 degrees and repeated the scan?

Mailchimp did it too: http://blog.mailchimp.com/going-freemium-one-year-later/

What exactly did you find so subpar? Service from just about any carrier should have been good considering you were in a city with a subway. My experience with world phones in Europe wasn't exactly thrilling. I bought a sim in London and then got to pay 2 pounds per day just to turn it on in Spain. What union/country/territory do you live in who's carriers have seemingly gotten it so right?

I'm pretty sure it's the pictures.

From TFA:

Or you should not buy an iPhone in the first place. Give your money to a vendor who deserves it.

What's preventing you from upgrading to IE8 on XP?

That's a really interesting way of looking at it.

All of the existing Android implementations of Flash behave like this. On my Viewsonic GTablet, Flash 10.2 defaults to loading On Demand (ie you click play) in both the default browser and alternate browsers like Opera Mobile.

Just like Mars, Venus's atmosphere is 96% Carbon Dioxide, which is heavy enough not to get blown off into space by solar wind.

It would just get carried off into space by the solar wind. See: Mars.

The distribution of source code (encryption in particular) is explicitly protected under the First Amendment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States

Stop being stubborn - why not KVM in, prove it's their fault, and then make them reimburse you for it?

Sounds like you're either incapable or unwilling to fix the problem yourself, but at the same time you refuse to let them do it? What exactly would make you happy here? And don't say "moving me back to the old hardware and datacenter that I was paying for!" Be realistic.

You said yourself that it's new hardware. It's completely reasonable for them to suggest you've got a bad NIC driver in there for whatever card you were moved to.

This is almost certainly a problem on the system itself. I've seen a handful of cases where hardware load balancers in DSR mode can lead to connection pileups under certain conditions, but 99% of the time it's a problem on the server itself. In any event, tuning should be able to prevent that from knocking the box over completely, allowing you to stay logged in and see what's going on.

Also, by claiming that nothing has changed on the system, you're either lying, or you're a horrible sysadmin who doesn't apply updates. Another potential scenario I see here (obviously aside from new hardware using previously unused drivers...) is that you or your package management system installed a new kernel or NIC driver, but never rebooted. Then when the server was powered off and migrated to the new facility, it came back up with the new (and potentially problematic) driver/kernel.

Switch providers. Plenty offer remote reboot and serial console or KVM for both VMs or physical servers, which would allow you to go crazy with custom encrypted partitions etc. At the end of the day though, someone somewhere at the hosting company is still going to be able to reboot your server into a rescue environment and reset the root password. Go colocation if you're really that paranoid about it.

You also have zero chance with litigation, unless you've somehow gotten them to sign something saying they specifically won't muck around in your server.

I'd also like to know how you *know* it's a hardware or network issue outside of your server. How do you know it's not your NIC driver hanging up? Older e1000 drivers (super common card in the hosting industry) are quite flaky. What research have you done outside of your internal monitoring?